“There are little folds of skin all over the place, you can hardly find it. The little hole underneath is so terribly small that I simply can’t imagine how a man can get in there, let alone how a whole baby can get out!”
Anne Frank

“The mall was shut in 1997, and an unfortunate series of events occurred thereafter. The mall was set ablaze in 1999, causing some casualties and in 2004, one person was killed from collapsing debris during a partial demolition.

The mall’s fifth to eleventh floors were eventually dismantled to be in line with the original plan and New World has been roofless ever since.

With no roof, rainwater unsurprisingly collected in the basement. The pool of static water reared mosquitoes. Mosquitoes annoyed vendors in the neighborhood. To fix this problem, some vendors released a bunch of fish into the pool so as to curb mosquito breeding. Quickly, that bunch of fish reproduced into thousands.” – Source

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In light of the recent public anger over the Monsanto Protection Act, here’s a simple, printable list of companies that use Monsanto products. By avoiding products made by companies on this list, you can help ensure your money isn’t going to Monsanto and also watch out for the health of your family and yourself

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According to new research from the Netherlands, the psychological profile of people who participate in these types of erotic games “is characterized by a set of balanced, autonomous, and beneficial personality characteristics.” Compared to those who engage in more mainstream sexual behavior, such aficionados report “a higher level of subjective well-being.” “We conclude that (these activities) may be thought of as a recreational leisure, rather than the expression of psychopathological processes,” psychologist Andreas Wismeijer of Nyenrode Business University writes in the Journal of Sexual Medicine.

The film, Star Wars, premiered on May 25, 1977. Today, on its 36th anniversary, I’m examining the evolution of the film’s logo.

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Regina Dugan, former director of the Defense Advanced Research Agency (DARPA) and current head of Google-owned Motorola’s research division, introduced a prototype “vitamin authentication” tablet which turns your entire body into a walking authentication token. “We got to do a lot of epic shit when I was at DARPA,” Dugan said. Indeed, DARPA has been involved in everything from weaponized hallucinations to tiny spy computers to military human enhancements to automated drone-borne targeting and tracking systems to linking rat brains over the internet and much more. Forget traditional usernames and passwords, this technology unveiled at D11 uses a tiny stomach acid-powered tablet to produce an 18-bit signal which can be detected by outside devices and used for authentication.

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A 20-year San Antonio Police Department veteran was ordered Wednesday to serve six months in jail for a bizarre incident last year in which he was found wandering the streets near his wrecked city vehicle, disoriented and without pants. Sgt. Joseph Earl Myers, 53, who resigned almost immediately after the incident, had no explanation for the odd occurrence as state District Judge Melisa Skinner pressed him for answers that have so far eluded authorities. “I made some bad decisions,” Myers said while apologizing, conceding he’d mixed alcohol with the prescription sleep drug Ambien the night before. The former narcotics officer added that he has no idea how cocaine was found in his system, although he doesn’t dispute it was. He’d never used illegal substances before, he said. “I don’t know where I was. I was irrational. I was disoriented,” he told authorities. “I don’t remember leaving the house. I don’t remember taking cocaine.” Thanks Jasmine

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A Lehigh County woman is behind bars for allegedly poisoning burritos and feeding them to her family. Ann Marie Haines cooked up the meal Tuesday night inside her home on Yorkshire Drive in Lower Macungie Township because her husband and daughter didn’t invite her to go along on a car shopping trip, police said. Investigators said Haines crushed up some sort of medication and put it into the burritos, which she then fed to her husband and daughter. They reportedly felt dizzy and tired and had to be taken to the hospital to be checked out.

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In a discussion of efforts to legalize it across the country, Bloomberg said, “There’s no medical. This is one of the great hoaxes of all time.” He went on to make another eyebrow raising statement about how legalizing marijuana will cause other problems. “Drug dealers have families to feed,” Bloomberg said. “If they can’t sell marijuana, they’ll sell something else.” Bloomberg says that “something else” will be worse than pot. “The push to legalize this is just wrongheaded,” Bloomberg added.

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An enormous law enforcement effort seeks to raise prices at every point in the supply chain from farmers to end-users: Eradicating coca crops in source countries, hindering access to chemicals required for drug production, interdicting smuggling routes internationally and within our borders, street-level police actions against local dealers. That’s why this may be the most embarrassing graph in the history of drug control policy. (I’m grateful to Peter Reuter, Jonathan Caulkins, and Sarah Chandler for their willingness to share this figure from their work.) Law enforcement strategies have utterly failed to even maintain street prices of the key illicit substances. Street drug prices in the below figure fell by roughly a factor of five between 1980 and 2008. Meanwhile the number of drug offenders locked up in our jails and prisons went from fewer than 42,000 in 1980 to a peak of 562,000 in 2007.

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Frequent cannabis smokers possess no greater lung cancer risk than do either occasional pot smokers or non-smokers Subjects who regularly inhale cannabis smoke do not possess an increased risk of lung cancer compared to those who either consume it occasionally or not at all, according to data presented in April at the annual meeting of the American Academy for Cancer Research. Investigators from the University of California, Los Angeles analyzed data from six case-control studies, conducted between 1999 and 2012, involving over 5,000 subjects (2,159 cases and 2,985 controls) from around the world. They reported, “Our pooled results showed no significant association between the intensity, duration, or cumulative consumption of cannabis smoke and the risk of lung cancer overall or in never smokers.”

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More than two dozen New Jersey bars caught pouring cheap hooch into top-shelf bottles got away with cheating customers likely because 44 percent of tipplers can’t even taste the difference, a Post survey has found. We enlisted eager volunteers to sample a shot of the $35-a-bottle French-made Grey Goose vodka and a shot of upstate Syracuse’s $8-a-bottle grain vodka Alexis to see whether they could pick the “better” booze. The results were sobering — 22 of the 50 tasters preferred the low-end elixir.

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In an effort to gain a greater buzz for fewer calories, some young drinkers are inhaling their liquor – either pouring it over dry ice or ‘freebasing’ it and sucking up the vapors. Either way, going around the stomach and liver is incredibly risky, doctors say.

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It was in Germany, though, that the drug first became popular. When the then-Berlin-based drug maker Temmler Werke launched its methamphetamine compound onto the market in 1938, high-ranking army physiologist Otto Ranke saw in it a true miracle drug that could keep tired pilots alert and an entire army euphoric. It was the ideal war drug. In September 1939, Ranke tested the drug on university students, who were suddenly capable of impressive productivity despite being short on sleep. From that point on, the Wehrmacht, Germany’s World War II army, distributed millions of the tablets to soldiers on the front, who soon dubbed the stimulant “Panzerschokolade” (“tank chocolate”). British newspapers reported that German soldiers were using a “miracle pill.” But for many soldiers, the miracle became a nightmare.

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According to a suit filed in Manhattan Supreme Court and reported on by New York Daily News, Greenidge says she was persuaded to try the lipstick at a pop-up shop outside of Barclay’s Arena where the concert was held. “(MAC) didn’t use a fresh or new lipstick tube, but rather one that had been used for other patrons,” the Daily News quotes the suit as charging. Two weeks later, Greenidge says she developed a cold sore. A doctor later alledgedly diagnosed her as having herpes, a condition Greenidge says cost her two weeks of work as a waitress and, according to the suit, “mental anguish and emotional distress” that can only be relieved by an unspecified sum.

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The old saying, “You are what you eat,” poses troubling implications for public health in light of a new study on chicken meat, which found that most of it contains dangerously high levels of toxic arsenic. And the worst part is that industrial chicken producers are directly responsible for causing this, as they intentionally add arsenic-based pharmaceutical drugs to chicken feed in order to bulk them up quickly and improve the color of their meat, which in turn poisons you and your family. You can thank researchers from the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future in Maryland for exposing this little-known fact in a recent paper published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives. As it turns out, virtually all commercial chicken, including certified organic and “antibiotic-free” varieties, contain some level of inorganic arsenic. But it is the conventional chicken fed arsenic-based drugs that have the highest levels.

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As late as last year, the FBI ran a child pornography operation in an attempt to nab its customers. The service ran for two weeks “while attempting to identify more than 5,000 customers, according to a Seattle FBI agent’s statements to the court.” Court records indicate the site continued to distribute child pornography online while under FBI control; the Seattle-based special agent, a specialist in online crimes against children, detailed the investigation earlier this month in a statement to the court.

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This week the company expanded its reach by releasing a free app for iOS and Android that covers the same ground, including a course to “cure” homosexuality. Gay rights organizations are beginning to cry foul, noting that the American Psychiatric Association, among other mental health sources, have denounced “gay-curing” courses as psychologically damaging.

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The New Mexico landfill or “Atari Dump” where the game console maker buried its mistakes — the biggest being the game E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial — will be dug up by game developer Fuel Industries, which hopes to make a documentary about the project. Also known as the “Atari Graveyard” or the “E.T. Dump”, the desert landfill is the spot where Atari decided to permanently off-load tons of games that were sitting unsold in a warehouse in El Paso, Texas, in 1983. So they went to a dump in Alamogordo, N.M. This week the city council voted to allow Fuel to excavate. “That September, according to newspaper accounts, 14 trucks backed up to the dump and dropped their loads,” the blog Western Digs reports. “Company spokespeople told the local press that the waste was mostly broken and returned merchandise — consoles, boxes, and cartidges.”

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But one legal argument has somehow failed to make a major appearance in revenge-porn cases: confidentiality. Broadly speaking, to confide is “to give to the care or protection of another,” and it is often the defining trait of explicit media shared between romantic partners. Simply put, explicit images and videos are unlikely to be created or shared with an intimate without some expectation or implication of confidence. This reality has been acknowledged but underutilized in the dominant narrative on non-consensual pornography. In contrast to new rights that would be created by proposed “anti-revenge porn” laws, confidentiality is already a well-established legal concept. It is older than all of the privacy torts and statutes in America.

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“It seems like they are mostly focused on this program, like the program was the problem. It’s not, it’s the invasion of my family’s Constitutional right to privacy that is the problem, as well as the school allowing a private company access to my child without my consent or permission,” one concerned parent wrote in a Facebook post that has since been shared hundreds of times. “This is stolen information, and we cannot retrieve it.”

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The latest game spawned from the Alien film franchise is being made by Creative Assembly, a game studio in Horsham, UK. It is likely to be one of the first games to explore the potential of Microsoft’s next-generation Kinect sensors for the Xbox One games console. Announced at the same time as the unveiling of the Xbox One last week, the new Kinect is a huge improvement on its predecessor (see “New wave”). It will have HD colour and infrared cameras that can see if your eyes are open or closed in the dark. It will be able to detect your pulse from fluctuations in skin tone and, by measuring how light reflects off your face, it will know when you start to sweat. This will allow the new Kinect to bring emotional gaming to your living room. Games can use the biological data to orchestrate your experience by adjusting the difficulty or intensity in real time, depending on how excited the system thinks you currently are.

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The fish that will be arriving around now, and in the coming months, to California waters may be carrying considerably more radioactivity and if so they may possibly be a public health hazard. Japanese and U.S. officials – of course – are pretending that the amount of radiation found in the bluefin is safe. But the overwhelming scientific consensus is that there is no safe level of radiation … and radiation consumed and taken into the body is much more dangerous than background radiation.

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In the summer of 1924 there was said to be no place ‘kooler’ than the Ku Klux Klan’s ‘Kool Koast Kamp’ – strictly depending on who you asked. Seen in a shocking brochure advertising a four-month resort to KKK members outside the coastal community of Rockport, Texas, is the Klansmens’ self-described ‘Healthiest road to the Koolest Summer.’ Set between a monstrous cross and rippling waves along the shore, guests are illustrated bathing and lying along the beach before tents and boardwalks strictly for white, conservative Christians.

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Mysterious light blamed for circle of fire

Tasmanian police and firefighters are unable to explain the source of a beam of light which reportedly fell from the sky and formed a circle of fire in a Hobart suburb. Early Saturday morning police and fire crews received calls from concerned residents in Carnegie Street at Claremont, who reported seeing a bright light igniting a fire in a nearby paddock. Tasmania Fire Service officer Scott Vinen says the blaze was quickly put out, leaving an obvious burnt patch. He says the bizarre incident has everyone baffled. “Once we put the fire out, we kind of walked through the fire and tried to find something,” he said. “We thought a flare or something may have landed there, but we couldn’t find any cause.” The Fire Service says it will not investigate further.

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Peter B. Bensinger, the apparent spokesman for the group, told the AP, “the supremacy of federal law over state law when it comes to drug laws isn’t in doubt.” He added, “It is outrageous that a lawsuit hasn’t been filed in federal court yet.” It turns out Peter B. Bensinger, who in the letter is representing the lobbying organization Save Our Society from Drugs, has a huge financial stake in preventing the legalization of cannabis. He is the founder and CEO of a drug testing company.

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State and local governments nationwide have struggled to accommodate a homeless population that has changed in recent years – now including large numbers of families with young children. As the WSJ reports, more than 21,000 children – an unprecedented 1% of the city’s youth – slept each night in a city shelter in January, an increase of 22% in the past year; as homeless families now spend more than a year in a shelter, on average, for the first time since 1987. New York City has seen one of the steepest increases in homeless families in the past decade, advocates said, growing 73% since 2002, and “is facing a homeless crisis worse than any time since the Great Depression.”

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Facebook has never been merely a social platform. Rather, it exploits our social interactions the way a Tupperware party does. Facebook does not exist to help us make friends, but to turn our network of connections, brand preferences, and activities over time — our “social graphs” — into a commodity for others to exploit. We Facebook users have been building a treasure lode of big data that government and corporate researchers have been mining to predict and influence what we buy and whom we vote for. We have been handing over to them vast quantities of information about ourselves and our friends, loved ones and acquaintances. With this information, Facebook and the “big data” research firms purchasing their data predict still more things about us – from our future product purchases or sexual orientation to our likelihood for civil disobedience or even terrorism.

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Lexington Police warned residents Monday of a scam in which a man in a wheelchair pretends to have a mental disability in order to get people to give him money, and soon after an LEX 18 reporter caught the alleged scammer in the act. Police say the man, Gary Thompson, 30, does have the need for the use of a wheelchair, but is also able to get out of it. They say that he has been spotted at several Lexington shopping centers, including the Lansdowne Shoppes, Hamburg and several places along Nicholasville Road. On Monday, police held a news conference to put out the information about Thompson. After the news conference was over, Thompsonn was spotted by an LEX 18 reporter who had just attended the news conference. The reporter, Kristen Pflum, said that she called to Thompson, who she says immediately went into his mental disability scam. When Pflum informed Thompson she had just attended a press conference about him, she says he immediately dropped the act and said, “Alright, you got me.”

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For over 12 centuries an intense battle has been fought between the code-makers and the code-breakers. We previously talked about some ciphers that have been defeated and the impact it had. However, despite decades (or centuries!) of cryptanalysis there are many ciphertexts which still successfully conceal their contents. Here’s a roundup of my top ten, with links to groups actively tackling them provided where possible.

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Matthew Matagrano (pictured at right), was not an inmate during the period. The 36-year-old former resident of Yonkers and South Ozone Park is listed as a high-risk sex offender in the state’s registry. Matagrano has a record of convictions for sodomy, first-degree sex abuse, burglary, and, not surprisingly, criminal impersonation. He has been arrested more than a dozen times, and has served several stints on Rikers. At his size, 5-foot-8 and 340 pounds, Matagrano shouldn’t have been so hard to miss. But he somehow was able to make or obtain a shield and a department identification card, and not only roam at least five facilities but obtain a sensitive Gate One all-access pass that allowed him to bring his car onto the island. He also is believed to have stolen at least two special correction department radios. Correction sources say the sheer number of security breakdowns alone that allowed this to happen is dizzying.

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A Brooklyn man faked his own kidnapping because he was terrified of his lover’s wrath. Rahmell Pettway, 36, told cops he spent two weeks away from his Bedford-Stuyvesant home — and then staged the crime to explain his absence to his girlfriend. But his poorly executed plan unraveled when the cops who found him hog-tied in the street noticed the roll of duct tape still dangling from his wrists. He eventually came clean, and was arrested for filing a false report.

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The red or yellow coloured tablets are being sold as ecstasy and have a star impression on them. “The exact contents of the pills are unknown, but they could, from past experience, contain a cocktail of different substances,” say police. Continue reading the main story “ Start Quote Users need to be aware of the dangers and understand the potentially devastating effect these pills can have” Chief Insp Fraser Lamb Strathclyde Police An investigation has been launched by the police along with health officials and medical staff. Chief Insp Fraser Lamb said: “These substances are unreliable, unpredictable and potentially very dangerous. “Users may believe that they have taken ecstasy and it is very likely that they will suffer from a significant negative reaction.

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New research shows that alcohol is now the third leading cause of the global burden of disease and injury — this even though most adults worldwide abstain from drinking. Researchers discovered the relationship while preparing the 2010 Global Burden of Disease study, a report published in the journal Addiction. “Alcohol consumption has been found to cause more than 200 different diseases and injuries,” said Kevin Shield, doctoral student and lead author of the study. “These include not only well-known outcomes of drinking such as liver cirrhosis or traffic accidents, but also several types of cancer, such as female breast cancer.”

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A new study by Canadian academics says Mother Teresa was a product of hype who housed the poor and sick in shoddy conditions, despite her access to a fortune. The Times of India, reporting on the controversial essay, wrote that the authors asserted Mother Teresa saw beauty in the downtrodden’s suffering and was far more willing to pray for them than provide practical medical care. Meanwhile, researchers say, the Vatican engaged in a PR ploy as it threw aside concerns about her suspicious financial dealings and contacts to forgo the five-year waiting period to beatify her. One of the researchers, Serge Larivee of the University of Montreal’s department of psychoeducation, told the school’s website, “Given the parsimonious management of Mother Teresa’s works, one may ask where the millions of dollars for the poorest of the poor have gone?”

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American neighborhoods are increasingly being policed by cops armed with the weapons and tactics of war. Federal funding in the billions of dollars has allowed state and local police departments to gain access to weapons and tactics created for overseas combat theaters – and yet very little is known about exactly how many police departments have military weapons and training, how militarized the police have become, and how extensively federal money is incentivizing this trend. It’s time to understand the true scope of the militarization of policing in America and the impact it is having in our neighborhoods. On March 6th, ACLU affiliates in 23 states filed over 255 public records requests with law enforcement agencies and National Guard offices to determine the extent to which federal funding and support has fueled the militarization of state and local police departments. Stay tuned as this project develops.

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Using banned ingredients that other countries have determined unsafe for human consumption has become a pandemic in this country. To prove this point, I found the best and easiest place to look for evidence was just across “the pond” in the United Kingdom, where they enjoy some of the same types of products we do – but with totally different ingredient lists. It is appalling to witness the examples I am about to share with you. The U.S. food corporations are unnecessarily feeding us chemicals – while leaving out almost all questionable ingredients in our friends’ products overseas. The point is the food industry has already formulated safer, better products, but they are voluntarily only selling inferior versions of these products here in America. The evidence of this runs the gamut from fast food places to boxed cake mix to cereal to candy and even oatmeal – you can’t escape it.

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You think the FDA has your back? Sure, they recently proposed two new regulations to up food safety measures, specifically how food processors and farmers can work better to keep their fresh products free of dangerous bacteria (remember that killer cantaloupe outbreak from 2011?). But while it may seem like the government is out to protect us from bad-even fatal-food-borne illnesses, which cause some 3,000 deaths a year, they don’t completely have our best interest-or health-in mind. “For numerous suspicious and disturbing reasons, the U.S. has allowed foods that are banned in many other developed countries into our food supply,” says nutritionist Mira Calton who, together with her husband Jayson Calton, Ph.D., wrote the new book Rich Food, Poor Food due out this February. During a six-year expedition that took them to 100 countries on seven continents, the Caltons studied more than 150 ingredients and put together a comprehensive list of the top 13 problematic products that are…

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It’s a new day for the New York Police Department, with technology increasingly informing the way cops do their jobs. With innovation comes new possibilities but also new concerns. For one, the NYPD is testing a new type of security apparatus that uses terahertz radiation to detect guns under clothing from a distance. As Police Commissioner Ray Kelly explained to the Daily News back in January, If something is obstructing the flow of that radiation — a weapon, for example — the device will highlight that object. Ignore, for a moment, the glaring constitutional concerns, which make the stop-and-frisk debate pale in comparison: virtual strip-searching, evasion of probable cause, potential racial profiling. Organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union are all over those, even though their opposition probably won’t make a difference. We’re scared of both terrorism and crime, even as the risks decrease; and when we’re scared, we’re willing to give up all sorts of freedoms…

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The young couple accused of stealing multiple police cars from two cities and leading authorities on a high-speed chase through two states Tuesday morning, have been identified as Blake Bills and Shayna Sykes. “I never heard of anyone stealing two police cars in one incident,” said Philadelphia Deputy Police Commissioner Richard Ross.

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Media reports have detailed the playboy lifestyle enjoyed by Nicholas Webber, GhostMarket’s founder, who had only just turned 18 at the time of his arrest in October 2009. Webber was sentenced to five years imprisonment in May 2011, and found himself at HM Prison Isis, a Category C male Young Offenders Institution, in South East London. Normally you would expect (and hope) a hacker’s criminal career to end there, but sadly that wasn’t to be. As the Daily Mail reports, Webber somehow managed to sign-up for the prison’s IT class, and from there managed to hack into the prison’s mainframe computer. According to the report, a spokesman for the prison service has confirmed that Webber was involved in the hack, but has downplayed the significance of the hack: “At the time of this incident in 2011 the educational computer system at HMP Isis was a closed network. No access to personal information or wider access to the internet or other prison systems would have been possible.”

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The New York City Police Department has embarked on a novel approach to deter juvenile robbers, essentially staging interventions and force-feeding outreach in an effort to stem a tide of robberies by dissuading those most likely to commit them. Officers not only make repeated drop-ins at homes and schools, but they also drive up to the teenagers in the streets, shouting out friendly hellos, in front of their friends. The force’s Intelligence Division also deciphers each teenager’s street name and gang affiliation. Detectives compile a binder on each teenager that includes photos from Facebook and arrest photos of the teenager’s associates, not unlike the flow charts generated by law enforcement officials to track organized crime.

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A man was jailed over the weekend on an assault charge for allegedly biting a 16-year-old girl on her buttocks in downtown Dallas, according to police documents. Shortly before 6 p.m. on Saturday, a Dallas police officer parked near the downtown Greyhound bus station heard a girl scream and man laughing, according to police records. The cop turned in the direction of the scream and spotted a man later identified as David Paul Olienyk, 38, laughing as he ran through traffic toward the bus station in the 200 block of South Lamar Street. The officer drove toward the victim, who appeared to be crying. A person with her told the officer, “He bit her on the butt!” Thanks Jasmine

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But there is reason to worry about this approaching revolution. As smart technologies become more intrusive, they risk undermining our autonomy by suppressing behaviors that someone somewhere has deemed undesirable. Smart forks inform us that we are eating too fast. Smart toothbrushes urge us to spend more time brushing our teeth. Smart sensors in our cars can tell if we drive too fast or brake too suddenly. These devices can give us useful feedback, but they can also share everything they know about our habits with institutions whose interests are not identical with our own. Insurance companies already offer significant discounts to drivers who agree to install smart sensors in order to monitor their driving habits. How long will it be before customers can’t get auto insurance without surrendering to such surveillance? And how long will it be before the self-tracking of our health (weight, diet, steps taken in a day) graduates from being a recreational novelty to a virtual requirement

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As a collective we must understand that democracy can only exist in a society with an educated populace, and the right for self-governance can only be obtained through knowledge. When a society embraces ignorance and forfeits its right to control its destiny, it has succumbed to apathy and can only deteriorate. In science, the analysis of anomalies contributes to our understanding of the physical world, improving our lives. In contrast, identifying anomalies in our society based on political doctrine has created fear and misunderstanding, restricting our lives. The lack of accountability from our leaders and our indifference to the consequences of their actions is diminishing our civil liberties. But it is not too late, we can prevent this from happening. We still have the ability to reclaim our future if we begin to educate ourselves.

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Around 40 percent of Palliative Health’s clients are tech workers, says Ernie Arreola, 38, the assistant manager. “We’re seeing people from some semiconductors, lots of engineers, lots of programmers,” he says. That makes sense, because the shop is an easy shot from some of the area’s biggest employers—Cisco Systems (CSCO), Google (GOOG), Adobe Systems (ADBE), Apple (AAPL), EBay (EBAY)—and a short drive from dozens more. Also, people in Silicon Valley do like their pot.

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In what is sure to be only the beginning of human vs. robot confrontations, a surveillance robot belonging to the police was recently shot after a six-hour standoff with a 62-year-old heavily inebriated man.

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7-year-old Josh Welch was eating a Pop-Tart at school. A teacher saw the pastry and said she thought it looked like it was being shaped into a gun. The teacher also said she heard Welch say, “Bang Bang” while he was holding it. That was enough to get him suspended. Welch said his teacher got it completely wrong, “It was already a rectangle and I just kept on biting it and tore off the top, and it kind of looked like a gun but it wasn’t.” Welch said he was trying to shape the Pop-Tart into a mountain. The school sent out a letter late in the day to parents explaining what happened and why they thought it was a threat saying, “A student used food to make an inappropriate gesture.”

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As Flatly described the images displayed on video monitors in federal court in Manhattan, some jurors put hands to their mouths. One shook her head. Another wiped his brow. One cannibalism website allegedly visited by Valle promised customers they would “only receive the highest quality human beef.” The jury also heard how the officer allegedly looked up “how to tie up a girl,” “human meat recipes,” “how to chloroform a girl,” “I want to sell a girl slave,” “how to cook a girl,” “death fetish” and “huge cooking tray” among other topics the defense says were part of a fetish fantasy that never posed a real threat. The FBI analysis of Valle’s laptop yielded an apparently staged video of a naked, screaming woman hanging over an open flame that lashed close to her skin. Flatly did not say where the video might have originated. There also were several photos of women with bright red apples stuffed in their mouths.

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The six-year NYPD veteran predicted that Sauer — a friend from his college days — was “going to be delicious” and said he wanted to use her head “as a centerpiece, frozen with her final expression of fear.” “I just enjoy the thought of making her suffer,” Valle wrote. Meanwhile, Moody Blues, identified in court as Christopher Collins, told Valle he wanted to dine on Sauer’s liver, “lightly cooked to keep it sweet and tender.” Acting like a mentor to a novice cannibal, Moody Blues said he had already eaten two women, while Valle wrote, “I’m dying to taste some girl meat.” Valle, 28, expressed a fascination for feet, and Moody Blues suggested cutting off one woman’s feet “and barbecuing them in front of her” while she was still alive. Moody Blues said face meat is “great for sandwiches,” and noted, “As for feet they are favorite of mine along with the c–t fillet.” He also offered Valle culinary tips, such as brushing human skin with olive oil while cooking it over an open fire

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A growing body of research has credited the power of positive thinking for contributing to good health and a longer, happier life. But a new study out of Germany suggests people who are pessimistic about their futures — specifically older people — may find greater life satisfaction down the road than their more optimistic peers. “The optimists are those who basically close their eyes, shut their eyes and don’t really want to know about the truth” about the inevitable costs of aging and death, he said. “That’s how we interpreted this finding — that basically these things [pessimistic expectations] really help people to be aware that they need to be cautious.”

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School of Visual Arts MFA student Marc Bradley Johnson was all set to debut his final piece, titled Take This Sperm and Be Free of Me, before health concerns thwarted everything he’d worked so hard for. First, Johnson accessed his materials. Then he set up a refrigerator at SVA’s Visual Arts Gallery in Chelsea, loaded it with 68 vials of his own semen, and put up a Craigslist ad alerting the public that anyone could walk in and take a part of him home. It was about “creation, parenting, desire, masculinity, fantasy, and reality,” he said. But his liberal Manhattan art school just saw dangerous waste.

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That’s the advice from the DIY jihad section in the latest issue of al-Qaida’s English-language web magazine, Inspire. The new “Open Source Jihad” (.pdf) is all about vehicular vandalism. One suggestion, penned by “Ibnul Irhab” in the new issue of Inspire, is to run up on parked cars with gas cans and a matchstick. “How safe will the West feel when parking their cars, knowing they’re up for a TORCHING,” Irhab writes. His helpful tips: avoid CCTV cameras; hide the gas in an apple juice bottle; and, importantly, “don’t get petrol on yourself.” This is what Open Source Jihad bills as “America’s worst nightmare.” Nor is it safe to drive to the store or the office. Inspire encourages the inspired to smear “lubricative oil” on roadways right before sharp blind turns to cause a traffic accident. (“Demolition Derby Style,” it promises.) If that doesn’t sound terrorist-y enough, another tip is to hammer nails into a pegboard painted black so oncoming cars blow out their tires. There’s even…

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A weaned harbor seal pup was resting onshore when an untagged male sea otter approached it, grasped it with its teeth and forepaws, bit it on the nose, and flipped it over. The harbor seal moved toward the water with the sea otter following closely. Once in the water, the sea otter gripped the harbor seal’s head with its forepaws and repeatedly bit it on the nose, causing a deep laceration. The sea otter and pup rolled violently in the water for approximately 15 min, while the pup struggled to free itself from the sea otter’s grasp. Finally, the sea otter positioned itself dorsal to the pup’s smaller body while grasping it by the head and holding it underwater in a position typical of mating sea otters. As the sea otter thrust his pelvis, his penis was extruded and intromission was observed. At 105 min into the encounter, the sea otter released the pup, now dead, and began grooming. Thanks Jasmine.

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Matt Taibbi’s most recent Rolling Stonearticle unpacks one of last year’s most shocking bank cases in our era of “Too Big to Jail.” In December, HSBC was punished with a $1.9 billion settlement on drug laundering charges, the largest in American history, yet only five weeks worth of profits for the world’s third largest bank. U.S. Assistant Attorney Lanny Breuer was uncharacteristically candid when explaining why he refused to pursue criminal charges: “HSBC would almost certainly have lost its banking license in the U.S., the future of the institution would have been under threat and the entire banking system would have been destabilized.” People were rightfully outraged when not a single HSBC banker went to jail for a decades’ worth of federal crimes, including money-laundering linked to drug cartels, terrorists and oppressive regimes. Taibbi dove deep into HSBC’s case and history, revealing that the bank’s crimes were even worst than we thought.

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An SS officer strode over and established they were all siblings from the Ovitz family. Immediately, the order went out: Wake the doctor! It was nearly midnight on Friday, May 19, 1944, and Dr Josef Mengele was asleep in his quarters. All the troopers on duty, however, were well aware of his passion for collecting human ‘freaks’, including hermaphrodites and giants. A lone dwarf wouldn’t have been sufficient reason to disturb his sleep, but a family — and seven of them — why, it was just like the fairy tale!

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Social media addiction has become an official condition. A clinic in London is treating more than 100 sufferers a year, with a professional footballer among those receiving counseling. A study last year by the University of Chicago suggested sites like Facebook are more addictive that alcohol and cigarettes.

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We’ve noted many times that when it comes to corporate media coverage of the so-called budget “sequester”–the immediate cuts to military and social spending set to hit in a matter of weeks–what matters most is what will happen to the military. The Washington Post had a whole piece (2/13/13) devoted to yet another round of complaints from military leaders–without a single comment from anyone who might take the view that cutting military spending would not be such a disaster.

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At around midday on Tuesday, the couple arrived to clean the house and found Dorner in an upstairs sitting room. His gun drawn, the suspect ordered them to stay calm. Mrs Reynolds ran down the stairs in a bid to escape, but Dorner caught her. He took the couple to a bedroom, where he made them lie on the floor, then bound their limbs with plastic zip-locks, gagged them with towels and covered their heads with pillowcases. “I thought we were dead,” Mr Reynolds said. The gunman repeatedly insisted, however, that he would not kill them. He revealed he had watched Mr Reynolds shovelling snow around the property in the preceding days, and told the couple he believed they were “hard-working, good people,” saying: “I don’t have a problem with you. I just want to clear my name.”

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Parent says West Sabine staff out of line after feces found

“My kid came home and he said, he told me that he had been inspected, his butt had been inspected at the elementary school for feces,” Little said. “And I asked him, I got to ask him about it and he said he was embarrassed by the whole situation.” Feces had been found on the gym floor at least five times during or after PE Class. It first happened last year only with this particular class of children, said principal Deborah Lane. Lane says she asked the children numerous times who was responsible. She even gave them lectures on germs and the dangers of e-coli. This last time, she requested the school nurse search for feces in the Tiger cubs’ pants. Accounts of how the search was conducted differ. “The school nurse basically pulled their pants out or down.”

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Facebook didn’t pay any federal or state income taxes last year and will receive a hefty tax refund, according to a recent report. How did the social network manage to swing such a nice tax break? Well, according to the Citizen for Tax Justice report the company benefited from the tax deductability of executive stock options, which reduced all of its income taxes by $1.03 billion in 2012. The company also has another $2.17 billion in extra tax-option breaks to carry forward in the future, according to the report, which means Facebook gets to deduct a total of more than $3 billion in current and future taxes, according to the report.

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One reason is that a freshly discovered weakness in a popular piece of software, known in the trade as a “zero-day” vulnerability because the software makers have had no time to develop a fix, can be cashed in for much more than a reputation boost and some free drinks at the bar. Information about such flaws can command prices in the hundreds of thousands of dollars from defense contractors, security agencies and governments. This trade in zero-day exploits is poorly documented, but it is perhaps the most visible part of a new industry that in the years to come is likely to swallow growing portions of the U.S. national defense budget, reshape international relations, and perhaps make the Web less safe for everyone. Zero-day exploits are valuable because they can be used to sneak software onto a computer system without detection by conventional computer security measures, such as antivirus packages or firewalls. Criminals might do that to intercept credit card numbers. An intellige…

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On a scale of one to 10, you probably think you’re a seven. And you wouldn’t be alone. While it’s impossible for most people to be above the median for a specific quality, people think they are better than most people in many arenas, from charitable behavior to work performance. The phenomenon, known as illusory superiority, is so stubbornly persistent that psychologists would be surprised if it didn’t show up in their studies, said David Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell who has studied the effect for decades. It happens for many reasons: Others are too polite to say what they really think, incompetent people lack the skills to assess their abilities accurately, and such self-delusions can actually protect people’s mental health, Dunning told LiveScience. Since psychological studies first began, people have given themselves top marks for most positive traits. While most people do well at assessing others, they are wildly positive about their own abilities, Dunning said.

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When the woman Tiffany Stanton Johnson, 25, arrived home and spoke to an officer on the scene, she stated that she had left her three children home alone to go shopping at Kmart. While speaking to the woman, the officer allegedly saw her son behind her playing with a crack rock, according to the complaint. At this, Johnson was forced to admit that she sells crack cocaine. After giving a consent search, the officer found a can with 12 grams of crack cocaine packaged for sale.

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“A funny comparison is if you take the biggest ungulate herd — so that would be bison, antelope, deer and elk — in Yellow Stone National Park, per meter squared — so per unit area — the fish on one of the reefs that I look at…they actually pee more than three times more [than that herd],” he said. Fish urine even dwarfs fertilizer-heavy golf course runoff — per meter squared — in nutrient content. Luke Joseph, a freshman biology major from Augusta, said he wouldn’t have guessed fish pee had so much to do with nutrient cycling. “That’s pretty cool,” he said. “I guess that means aquaponics might be a good way to grow things.”

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Turk appears in a YouTube video by White Trash Clan titled “My World is Blue” dancing in a blue tutu and fairy wings and carrying a wand. She blows pixie dust at the camera and mimes drug use. The video, posted in July 2012, shows people dancing in parking lots and pharmacies with giant cutouts of blue pills and rhapsodizing about prescription drug abuse: “I can stop when I want to / I’m not addicted / I don’t take pills / crush and sniff it / Blue is my world in this life how I live it / Come out to Staten Island, pay a little visit.”

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If there were a celebrity among brain chemicals, it would be dopamine. Supposedly released whenever we experience something pleasurable, it’s forever linked to salacious stories of sex, drugs and wild partying in the popular press. The Kim Kardashian of neurotransmitters, it gives instant appeal to listless reporting and gives editors an excuse to drop some booty on the science pages. There are too many bad examples to mention in detail, but I have some favourites. The Sun declared that “cupcakes could be as addictive as cocaine” because they apparently cause “a surge of the reward chemical dopamine to hit the decision-making area of the brain”. The article was topped off with a picture of Katy Perry, apparently a “cupcake fan” and, presumably, dangerously close to spiralling into a life of frosted-sponge addiction.

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The government is considering introducing internet filters, such as those used to block China off form the worldwide web, in order to stop Icelanders downloading or viewing pornography on the internet. The unprecedented censorship is justified by fears about damaging effects of the internet on children and women. Ogmundur Jonasson, Iceland’s interior minister, is drafting legislation to stop the access of online pornographic images and videos by young people through computers, games consoles and smartphones. “We have to be able to discuss a ban on violent pornography, which we all agree has a very harmful effects on young people and can have a clear link to incidences of violent crime,” he said.

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Miss Sanborn tells us that an eccentric gentleman, having taken a fancy to see a large party of noseless persons, invited every one thus afflicted, whom he met in the streets, to dine on a certain day at a tavern, where he formed them into a brotherhood.

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Russian Meteorite Pictures & Video

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Since sex usually occurs in water, it doesn’t tend to preserve well. But in one four-hundred-million-year-old silica-rich deposit local changes in pH remobilized some of the silica, leaving behind thin films of the original organic material. In the specimen the chert beautifully preserved the plant’s delicate archegonium (from goni, Hindi for ‘sack,’ akin to yoni, Sanskrit for ‘vagina’) — the female sex organ. Another sample of rock, sliced thin and observed with a microscope, shows Aglaphyton’s antheridium, its male sex organ — filled with sperm cells ready to explode. Here, preserved by chance, with neither compromised actors nor moral qualm, is a geographic equivalent of the ‘money shot’ of pornographic films — an ejaculation event 140,000 times older than Homer’s Odyssey, 400 times older than the human species, and almost as old as the appearance of animals in the fossil record.

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Does this make you wonder how much footage from prominent world events is actually digitally created to assist in advancing a dark agenda? How much fake news are we being fed? Dictators, terrorists, riots, revolution beamed into our living rooms as part of on-going psychological warfare against the masses? Is this a conventional war of tanks and guns and bombs in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya or is it really all part of a sustained psychological war on the minds of every single person on the planet who watches television? Our advise? Stop watching mass media news. There’s nothing good for us there!

I’m proud to present my latest creation: The Hammer! The Hammer is a prototype test-your-strength game that’s an insertable, muscle-controlled, light-up dildo.

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We asked the 61% of Facebook users who have taken a break from using the site to tell us in their own words why they did so, and they mentioned a variety of reasons. The largest group (21%) said that their “Facebook vacation” was a result of being too busy with other demands or not having time to spend on the site. Others pointed toward a general lack of interest in the site itself (10% mentioned this in one way or another), an absence of compelling content (10%), excessive gossip or “drama” from their friends (9%), or concerns that they were spending too much time on the site and needed to take a break (8%).

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Learn why your favorite social network – Facebook – is actually bad. All the political and technical reasons you need to understand why you should consider deleting your Facebook account and how to do it.

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Facebook has shown no respect for its users privacy. The site notoriously makes it difficult to understand who you are sharing what with, and has been known to reset privacy settings to defaults without notifying users. Defaults which share everything. Facebook tracks your usage of the web and knows pretty much everything else about your life. Facebook supports CISPA, and why wouldn’t they? It gives them a free pass to give your data to anyone. SOPA and PIPA didn’t. A service that knows everything about you, even things you don’t want it to, supports legislation that would allow it to give anyone that information without recourse – sounds great doesn’t it?

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“This lawsuit is about preserving the integrity and legacy of a man who has spent years working hard at his musical craft and has earned the position of one of the greatest musical entertainers of all time,” said Gary. “We cannot sit idly and watch as technology giants or anyone else exploits the name or likeness of an innocent person with the goal of making millions of dollars,” he added. “The defendants have marketed Chubby Checker’s name on their product to gain a profit and this just isn’t right.” The “Chubby Checker” app, which appears on websites for Palm devices, claims to allow a person to determine a man’s penis size by using his shoe size.

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“I think my neighbors on their way to church see the buckets and stuff and think we’ve got a meth lab operation going on here. I just want to put their minds at ease, and let them know it’s maple syrup. And that they’re all welcome for pancakes if they want to come on over.”